Forest Service's Utah Move Frozen by a Spending Rule Expiring Dec. 11
Judge Vince Chhabria kept Congress's ban on reprogramming money for relocations and struck the committee-approval escape hatch, so the Forest Service's Salt Lake City move now needs an act of Congress. The Dec. 11 stopgap is the first bill that could renew or lift it.
The Forest Service's move to Salt Lake City was stopped this week by a clause in a spending law, not by any finding about Utah. On Tuesday, Oct. 13, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California stayed the Agriculture Department's reorganization at eight USDA components, ruling it overwhelmingly likely
that the planned closures and relocations violate restrictions Congress wrote into the department's appropriations laws.
For the Forest Service, that freezes the headquarters move from Washington, the closure of all nine regional offices and the shuttering of 23 research facilities. The stay has no end date. The spending restrictions it enforces do: they ride on a stopgap law that expires Friday, Dec. 11, 57 days from today, which makes the next funding vote the place where this move lives or dies.
Chhabria's 40-page order says the Court has no view on whether USDA's planned reorganization is a good idea or a bad one.
Its argument is about money. If Congress renews the riders, as the current stopgap already did once, the freeze simply continues.
The suit (No. 26-cv-09976-VC) was filed Sept. 8 by four federal unions, nonprofits and local governments from San Francisco to Prince George's County, Md.
A committee-approval clause did the work
Congress funds agencies largely in lump sums. Using that money for purposes other than those contemplated at the time of appropriation
is called reprogramming, and the whole order turns on it.
Section 716(a) of the fiscal 2026 agriculture spending law bars reprogramming that relocates an office or employees
without written notice to, and approval from, both appropriations committees 30 days ahead. The Forest Service is paid for under the separate Interior and Environment bill, whose § 421 demands the same committee approval for any workforce action touching a total of 10 staff members or 10 percent of the staffing of an affected program or office, whichever is less.
A headquarters move clears that bar many times over.
Here is the twist. Both sides agreed the approval clauses are unconstitutional. Under the Supreme Court's 1983 Chadha decision, two committees cannot act for Congress; only a bill passed by both chambers and presented to the president can. So the judge had to decide which half of each sentence survives.
USDA wanted the approval requirement cut and the notice requirement kept, which the order calls blanket permission
: tell the committees, then proceed. Chhabria kept the prohibition, because of history.
Section 716(a) was notice-only until 2014, when Congress, for fiscal 2015, added the approval requirement after Rep. Hal Rogers complained of USDA violat[ing] long-standing notification requirements.
Congress converted § 421 the same way in 2020. In the order's telling, lawmakers moved from you can go ahead and do it unless we step in to stop you
to you can't do this unless you ask our permission and we give it to you.
Keeping only the notice would have handed USDA the exact power Congress took away.
"Congress did not contemplate USDA using its appropriated funds to shut down offices or relocate employees. To the contrary, Congress was actively working to restrict the agency's ability to do so."
Judge Vince Chhabria, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California
The rest of the record did USDA few favors. It notified Congress about the Forest Service plan orally, and the record does not include the content of that communication.
Its fiscal 2027 request asks for an additional $55 million to manage staff relocations,
a line that sits uneasily beside the claim that current money already covers the move.
The net effect is the biggest fact in the ruling. With the committee door bricked up, only an act of Congress, or a higher court that reads the riders differently, can unlock the money.
Letters without deadlines
For a Forest Service employee holding a management directed reassignment, or MDR, letter, paragraph 2 is the one that matters. It bars relocations outside the local commuting area, including by issuing or enforcing MDR letters or any other notice or directive of reassignment or relocation in whole or in part, including any deadlines in those letters.
USDA letters set report dates as early as Sept. 21, deadlines that have been on hold since mid-September and now cannot be enforced. The commuting area is defined by regulation as where people live and can reasonably be expected to travel back and forth daily to their usual employment.
Washington to Salt Lake City is not that.
The order carves out four exceptions:
- Moves inside the National Capital Region. USDA can shift staff among Washington-area offices and close the ones emptied that way.
- Voluntary job changes. An employee who wins a job through USAJobs or internal merit hiring may take it, if it is unrelated to the reorganization.
- Already-empty offices. Locations with no staff as of USDA's notification letter to Congress, sent in April or June, are not covered.
- People who already moved. Those who began work at a new duty station before the first administrative stay on Sept. 14 stay put, and USDA may still pay
any associated relocation incentive or payment entitlements to those employees.
The protection covers everyone, not just union members, because keeping some workers in old offices while moving others would leave USDA paying for two offices with two sets of employees rather than one.
USDA must email affected employees and post the order on its reorganization website by today, Thursday, Oct. 15, and file a compliance declaration by Thursday, Oct. 22.
The order also covers seven other USDA components, among them the research mission area that runs the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland, which the order names specifically. Inside the Forest Service, regional work would have shifted to 15 state offices and service centers in cities such as Missoula, Mont., with research centralized in Fort Collins, Colo.
6,500 letters, 250 moves
The case's headcounts don't agree. In March, the order says, the Forest Service told more than 6,000 employees they were being considered for mandatory relocation. USDA now tells the court that at most, 250 Forest Service employees will be relocated outside of their local commuting area.
| Who said it | When | Forest Service employees affected |
|---|---|---|
| Forest Service letters (per court record) | March 2026 | More than 6,000 told they were being considered for mandatory relocation; plaintiffs put it at about 6,500 |
| NFFE union estimate | April 2026 | About 6,500 affected by the HQ move; 2,700 by research closures |
| Chief Tom Schultz, to House appropriators | April 16, 2026 | About 500 would relocate, including about 260 of 350 in the D.C. area |
| Schultz, to the Salt Lake Tribune | Summer 2026 | "Probably less than 300 people" |
| USDA, in court | As of Sept. 14, 2026 | "At most, 250" relocated outside their commuting area |
The official estimate halved in five months. USDA's 250 is 0.75% of the 33,500 employees it cited to the judge. Read that way, the move is small.
Read the other way, the letters went to roughly 26 times as many people as USDA now expects to move, and a letter is not neutral: some who get one leave. And at headquarters, the chief's April figures meant about 74% of the agency's D.C.-area staff were slated to go.
USDA has seen this before. When it moved the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City in 2019, a Partnership for Public Service analysis found, ERS went from an average of 298 permanent full-time employees in fiscal 2017–2018 to a low of 144 in January 2020, a drop of about 52%. NIFA fell from an average of 303 to a low of 97.
That history gives weight to the judge's finding that it does not appear USDA has conducted any analysis
showing the risks to functions like wildfire response are not real.
Utah's case, and the December bill
The administration's case deserves its strongest form. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced it on March 31 as a way to put the agency closer to the forests we manage
while saving taxpayer dollars and boosting employee recruitment.
Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told House appropriators in April the agency would proceed with or without their approval. Justice Department attorney Taylor Pitz made the legal case at a Sept. 29 hearing, reading the riders narrowly: It's not, 'you can't reorganize unless you get approval.' It's, 'can't move money around a certain way.'
Her best point was the stopgap. Congress knew about the plan and extended funding without new language: It could have very easily, specifically prevented the use of funds for these activities. Congress has chosen not to do that.
The answer lies in how stopgaps work. A continuing resolution carries forward the prior year's terms, riders included, so silence renewed the ban rather than waiving it. At the same hearing, Chhabria said the appropriations language itself sets the rule: The default is that you're not allowed to do it.
"On the facts of this case, the most appropriate remedy is indeed to stay USDA's reorganization expenditures, full stop."
Judge Vince Chhabria, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz and Senate President J. Stuart Adams answered on Oct. 14, in a joint statement reported by FOX 13, that decisions about Western forests should be made closer to the people who know these lands best, not by bureaucrats and special interests thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C.
Their own region offers a caution. The Bureau of Land Management moved its headquarters to Grand Junction, Colo., in 2019, and President Biden moved it back in 2021, the Salt Lake Tribune noted. A move made by agency decision can be unmade the same way; one written into law is far sturdier. The December bill is Utah's best route as much as USDA's.
The faster path is the Ninth Circuit. A USDA spokesperson said only, The Department is reviewing the Judge's decision and will file its response with the Court.
Chhabria had warned he would not pause his own ruling: If you want to rush to the Ninth Circuit to get a stay or whatever, you need to be ready to do that.
Then comes Dec. 11, when the stopgap now funding the government runs out. The judge pointed USDA there himself: If the agency wishes to move forward with its plans to close offices and relocate employees, it will soon have the opportunity to convince Congress of the merits of those plans.
A bill that copies the old riders renews the ban by default. Dropping or rewriting them takes both chambers and a presidential signature, a heavier lift than a quiet word with two committees ever was.
The Salt Lake City move is no longer the chief's call or the judge's; it belongs to whoever writes the December bill, and in that bill, silence means no.
